Content tagged with Civil society repression

The applicants – Mariya Alekhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich – are members of Pussy Riot, a Russian feminist punk band critical of the Kremlin and its connections with the Orthodox church. Five members of the band attempted to perform a protest song in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral.

The four applicants were members of NIDA, a civic movement that seeks liberty, justice, truth and change in Azerbaijan through peaceful means. They were arrested and charged for allegedly obtaining 22 Molotov cocktails and supplying them to two other NIDA members, who had been arrested earlier in March.

The applicant, Anar Mammadli, is a civil society activist and human rights defender who founded the NGO Election Monitoring and Democracy Studies Centre. He has reported on the human rights situation in Azerbaijan before the Council of Europe and in cooperation with UN institutions.

When 21-year-old Bayram Mammadov and 22-year-old Giyas Ibrahimov sprayed graffiti on a statue of Azerbaijan’s former president, Heydar Aliyev, they may have expected a police warning or a fine. Instead, they found themselves arrested on trumped-up drugs charges, beaten and threatened until they confessed.

Political activist Alexei Navalny, and his brother, Oleg Navalny, an entrepreneur, were convicted of fraud and money laundering by a Russian court on 30 December 2014. Alexei received a suspended sentence of three and a half years.

Students from Yale Law School have collaborated with EHRAC on a case challenging a block the government of Azerbaijan has placed on four news websites in Azerbaijan for publishing allegedly prohibited material.

Almost six years after the Russian parliament enacted legislation requiring any organisation receiving funding from abroad to register as ‘foreign agents’, EHRAC and Memorial HRC, alongside a consortium of other NGOs, are challenging the Act’s purpose before the European Court.

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